Here’s the good news: In a new study, the overall rate of children’s eye injuries from sports and recreation decreased slightly from 1990 to 2012. Here’s the bad news: Eye injuries to children from what are called nonpowder guns, including BB guns, pellet guns and paintball guns, increased significantly. And here’s the worse news: Those eye injuries were disproportionately likely to be serious.

The study, published this month in the journal Pediatrics, looked at children under 18 treated in a nationally representative sample of about 100 hospital emergency rooms in the United States. Most were released from the E.R. after treatment, but 4.7 percent were hospitalized with more serious injuries.

Three-fourths of the injured children were boys, and 43 percent of the injuries were in children aged 10 to 14.

Dr. Gary Smith, the director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who was the senior author on the study, said that sports-related eye injuries in children have been a concern for a long time, leading to recommendations about protective eyewear in many sports.

The single largest source of eye injuries in the study — 15.9 percent — was basketball. After that came baseball and softball, which were associated with 15.2 percent of the injuries. Nonpowder guns accounted for 10.6 percent of the eye injuries — but for almost half of the hospitalizations, which tend to reflect serious injuries, such as laceration or puncture of the eye, that may lead to permanent visual loss.

Over the 23-year period of the study, the rate of eye injuries caused by nonpowder guns rose by 168.8 percent. Dr. Smith said the study did not explore the reason for the increase.

But it’s not a new issue; as long ago as 1911, The New York Times reported on an 8-year-old in Washington Heights who had been injured by an air gun and had lost the sight in his right eye.

Basketball is known to be a high-risk sport for eye injuries, Dr. Smith said. Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Ophthalmology recommend that all players wear protective eyewear with polycarbonate lenses; they’d like to see that required by the National Federation of State High School Associations, which regulates high school sports.

“It would be rare to see someone wearing protective eyewear in basketball,” Dr. Smith said. “The culture of that sport hasn’t changed yet. We need to work with the coaches.”

As far as baseball and softball, the study calls for face masks on batting helmets (currently required in softball but not in Little League or high school baseball) and face guards for defensive players (currently optional).

But to prevent almost half of the more serious eye injuries, you need to reach the kids shooting the nonpowder guns — the kinds that some parents may think of as harmless. “Everyone in the group should be wearing protective eyewear,” Dr. Smith said. “If we are looking at all the sport and recreation eye injuries, the most severe are being caused by nonpowder guns, therefore we should especially focus our efforts to prevent those injuries.”

So the recommendations are adult supervision and protective eyewear, along with some special gun-related precautions, like teaching children to use targets that prevent ricocheting when they use BB or pellet guns. “These can be life-altering injuries: In a second, an injury can occur that will be with you the rest of your life,” Dr. Smith said.

Toy guns for young children — as opposed to nonpowder guns — raise other issues for many parents. Long before children reach the age of BB guns and pellet guns, many are drawn to toy guns, which do not pose these same safety concerns about eye injuries, but bring up questions about behavior and aggression.

I remember the efforts of my first son to foil the no-guns rule when he was a toddler in a day care center in Cambridge, Mass. His teachers kept a sharp eye out for any child biting away parts of a sandwich to create a gun shape or constructing possible armaments out of Tinker Toys or Legos. But my son — the child of a predictably liberal pediatrician — claimed he was building a bird feeder, then pointed it at a classmate and said, “Bang, I killed you with my bird feeder.”

Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at the Ohio State University in Columbus, said the experimental evidence about toy guns shows that “The mere sight of a gun makes you more aggressive.” This is known as the “weapons effect.” It’s not just that more aggressive children tend to play with guns; in studies where children were randomized to play with a gun or with some nonaggressive toy, he said, playing with the gun led to more aggressive behavior.

In his study published last year, children from 8 to 12 years old were randomized to see PG movies either with or without guns in them (the movies were otherwise identical). Then the children were observed in a room that contained a cabinet with an unloaded gun in a closed drawer. The children who had watched the version of the movie with guns, Dr. Bushman said, held the gun for an average of 53 seconds, compared to 11 seconds for the children who had watched the no-gun version. And they pulled the trigger on average three times, compared to no times. “One kid put the gun against his friend’s head and pulled the trigger,” he said. “Another pointed it out the window at passers-by on the street.”

He cited a statistic that less than 60 percent of gun owners secure their guns. “Lock up the guns and keep the ammunition separate,” he said. “Do so in an opaque container, not a glass cabinet — just seeing a gun increases aggression.”

And not surprisingly, he would not recommend toy guns of any kind, but would advocate using the topic as an occasion for discussion: “I think parents need to talk to their kids about why they don’t want them to play with guns,” he said.

Whatever you decide — or whatever you think you have decided, whatever your child ends up doing, younger or older, keep those eyes safe. Even if you ban toy guns when your child is young, he may still come up against paintball guns and pellet guns; insist on protective eyewear, and keep those eyes safe.

Parenthood is full of challenges — you often have to find ways to say, don’t do such and such, but if you do, keep yourself safe — those of you with middle school and high school age children know this, you’ve had those conversations about alcohol and drugs and sex — or if you haven’t, you should.

So here’s one more kind of safety to consider: Children using nonpowder guns need to wear protective eyewear. Eyes are worth protecting, whatever you’re aiming at.